AA’s Guide to the Motorway (1959)
The title in set in Stephenson Blake’s Condensed Sans Serif No. 7 , see Condensed & Elongated Sans Serifs, with ample letterspacing. The bold caps used for “Automobile Association” could be from Miller & Richard’s Grotesque No. 3, see Sans-Serifs & Grotesques. A decade later, these classic British grotesques would have made room for so-called neo-grotesks like Helvetica, Univers, etc.
“Never before have motorists in Britian had the opportunity of travelling at relatively high speeds for a long period” begins this folder issued by the AA, one of the UK’s motorists organisations, in late 1959 when this was issued. One has to say that the London-centric organisation can’t have been unaware that the country’s first Motorway standard road, the Preston By-pass, part of the M6 had been opened the year before!
Anyhow, this folder describes not just the route of the core section of the M1 that would open to great fanfare on 1 November 1959, but explains what the motorist would encounter and how to use this new style of road with a ‘Motorway Code’ of driving. It also explains how unaccustomed not just the driver but the vehicle itself may prove to ‘long periods of high speed’ that would not have been possible before on the UK’s trunk road network.
The cover to the brochure is quite ‘American’ in style, echoing the modernity of freeways I suspect, and includes the old AA logo along with the then long established headquarters in London’s Leicester Square of Fanum House.
The exemplary signs reproduced at the left show Transport in indirect use. The new typeface for road signs in the UK was designed between 1957 and 1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. The text is set in Times New Roman.
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The AA now uses New Transport extensively, both on its ubiquitous maps and on its website.